About This Course

This site is the written companion to a guest lecture on Value Chain Analysis taught at Columbia SIPA since 2017 alongside Professor Glenn Denning.

Speaker bio

Carl Cervone came to coffee through development work. After studying environmental science, he moved to Tanzania in 2004 to work in microfinance. In 2006, he joined TechnoServe and spent a decade working on coffee value chains across East Africa and Latin America. In 2016, he cofounded Enveritas, which uses satellite data and machine learning to map and verify sustainability across coffee supply chains. In 2023, he cofounded Kariba Labs, which applies similar techniques to software value chains. He is a Columbia Business School alum.

The examples in this course draw from his work in coffee, international business, and data science.

Version history

The current version was presented in March 2026. You can browse all past lecture slides (2017-2025) in the Additional Resources section.